RIM has seemingly taken the type of bold moves necessary, unveiling relatively impressive new hardware, and a slick new OS based on its recent acquisition QNX. But in an embarassing twist, it maybe forced to change the name of that new OS from BBX.

After announcing the new OS at its fourth annual BlackBerry Developer Conference (DevCon) in San Francisco, Calif., it was revealed that RIM ignored that there was already a preexisting service of this name.

BASIS Technology Corp., a business software firm, owns trademarks internationally on BBx [press release]. BBx is in fact the company's flagship service, which it describes as an "operating system independent language, database, and toolset", elaborating that the service offers "OS-agnostic language that runs on numerous OSs, Java platforms, and JavaScript-enabled browsers."

BASIS Technology says it is suing RIM to prevent the use of its trademark, commenting, "[A] new BlackBerry operating system (OS) named "BBX" is causing great confusion for the worldwide BASIS community and could potentially harm BASIS' [sic] reputation for enabling cross-platform application development....We are fielding numerous customer inquiries voicing their confusion about the RIM announcement."

RIM announces BBX... just kidding! [Source: RIM]

RIM claims it did nothing wrong. It writes, "RIM has not yet received a copy of the legal complaint described in Basis International's press release, but we do not believe the marks are confusing, particularly since our respective companies are in different lines of business."

But ultimately RIM and BASIS Technology both run internet services, so the possibility for confusion is high, especially considering that RIM precisely copied the name of BASIS's flagship product.

This is an unfortunate situation for RIM as retracting the name would create customer confusion and add another item to the long list of company problems. BBX seemed the perfect name as it's a natural word blend of "BlackBerry" and "QNX". But apparently RIM has fallen victim to yet another potentially serious setbak.